Perahim. Wild parade

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg is hosting an extensive retrospective exhibition Jules Perahim, on the occasion of the centenary of the artist's birth, from November 15, 2014 to March 8, 2015. Inaugurated in the presence of Marina-Vanci Perahim, professor emeritus of art history at the Sorbonne and the painter's wife, the exhibition comprises over 150 works, displayed in a chronological sequence; the curator of the exhibition is Estelle Pietrzyk, the museum's director.

La parade sauvage, a phrase derived from Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, best defines Perahim's art, which is captured in all the stages of his almost 70 years of activity.

Devoted to surrealism, which he had served all his life, Jules Perahim made his debut in the magazine 'unu' in August 1930; less than a month later, together with Aurel Baranga and Gherasim Luca, he founded the magazine 'Alge', which brought a fresh breath of fresh air to the Romanian avant-garde; they were then 16 years old, extremely talented and enthusiastic, and represented a new generation of artists who consolidated Romanian surrealism. In addition to the 10 issues of the magazine "Alge", they also published the magazine "Pulă" on October 1, 1931 (13 copies, not for sale) and the magazine "Muci" (a single issue, published on February 7, 1932, 200 copies), symbols of nonconformism and youthful bravado; these publications, which have become true bibliophilic rarities today, are on display in the exhibition, together with the books illustrated by Perahim in the Romanian pre- and post-war period. It is worth noting the professionalism of the organizers who have written the captions of these documents with Romanian diacritics. The series of portraits and self-portraits, mainly social drawings and oil paintings completes the part dedicated to the artist's work in the country. These include, in addition to the series of self-portraits, the two portraits of Gherasim Luca, the first in oil, in which he is depicted as a death mask (1931), and the second in pencil, in which the poet is depicted with three eyes. The poster for the exhibition was also a work from the Romanian period, Mitraliera, produced in 1932; sensing the danger of Nazism and ethnic discrimination, Perahim depicted in nuce in this painting the oppressive boot, which would become a main character in Victor Brauner's La ville qui rêve(The City that Dreams, 1937) five years later.

Once he arrived in France in 1969, a new phase, full of force and effervescence, unleashed all his creative energies; suggestively entitled Renaissance in the exhibition, it is illustrated by hypnotic tropical forests populated by hybrid creatures, with zoomorphic and anthropomorphic aspects that multiply endlessly, as in the painting L'animal ange(The Angel Animal, 1970). The discovery of Africa again changes the compositional register of the works, the colors come alive and the action takes precedence: wars, tribes on the move, equestrian battles, caravans in the desert. His creative verve seems to know no bounds, and the characters become unmistakable icons that define his new style. Painting or alchemy, Perahim seems to hold, like Rimbaud, "the key to this wild parade"(La Guerre africaine - The African War, 1976).

In reply to a questionnaire sent by Arturo Schwarz, curator of the 1986 Venice Biennale, to all the participants, Jules Perahim outlined a brief course in "alchemy-painting", as he himself called his art: "Preliminary operation: thorough hand washing. Silver white, cobalt-blue, cadmium-red, earth and stone pigments are put on the crystal palette: earth burnt by Siena, emerald-green. We then dive into the empty space of the white canvas. The brushes come to life in a back-and-forth movement, from the rainbow palette to the canvas. Matter comes to life; shapes and colors chain themselves to each other, exhilarated by the passionate attraction of opposites: stiff-soft, straight-curved, light-heavy, warm-cold. Under my delighted gaze, they take the form of walls, bodies, horizons and shells, birds and stones, skies and tree trunks; in this boiling world, transmutations are made according to a game of analogies and correspondences that is conducted without knowing quite how. Unknown and imaginary universes emerge, each time taking a resounding revenge on the grayness of everyday life. And I always wonder if this miracle will happen the next day".

Like all surrealists, Jules Perahim saw omens in all the surrounding reality, had premonitions and telepathic visions, and an empathic sensitivity guided his brush. In December 1989, for example, he began to paint a labyrinth, executed in the finest detail. When he also depicted some birds taking flight and escaping from the labyrinth, the anti-Caucasian and then anti-communist movements began in Romania. But his premonition was accurate because those birds, even if they wanted to fly away, were closely bound to the space of their imprisonment by tree trunks or many nets, their liberation being more illusory(Les Rescapés du Minotaure - Saved from the Labyrinth, 1990).

In another work, made in 1995, Perahim painted a house surrounded by walls pierced by huge gaps(La nostalgie d'un lieu - Nostalgia fora Place, 1995), which could suggest the house of his birth and early childhood, surrounded by ruins. Today, the house where Jules Perahim was born, in Bucharest, at 1 Calomfirescu Street, is itself a ruin, much more depressing than his vision in the painting(Birthplace, now abandoned).

Other analogies can be drawn between the works of his youth, painted in the country, and those of his Parisian years. For example, the troubled landscape in A Poplar Crossing the Sea (1932) is taken up again, in an apparently more serene vein, in Un arbre se promène (A Tree is Walking, 1995); but the danger is present here too, suggested by the deep chasm and the black birds crossing it, but it is depicted at a different spiritual age, when serenity dominates the restlessness of youth.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the Perahim exhibition is next to the works of Victor Brauner, another Romanian surrealist, a good friend in his youth in Bucharest, to whom the Strasbourg museum has dedicated several rooms in its permanent collection. At the same time, at the initiative of the organizers, a stand has been set up in the museum's bookshop where, along with the exhibition catalogue and the books published by Jules Perahim in France, it is possible to buy books by Gherasim Luca and Ilarie Voronca, published in French. The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg thus invites the public not only to an impressive Jules Perahim retrospective exhibition, but also to a true celebration of the Romanian avant-garde.